Dialectology
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Dialectology
Dialectology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and Historical_linguistics#Diachronic_and_synchronic_analysis, synchronic variation. Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical, lexical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually deal not only with populations that have lived in certain areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see language contact). Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include the problem of mutual intellig ...
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Dialect
A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or isolated areas. The non-standard dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form. Standard and nonstandard dialects A ''standard dialect'', also known as a "standardized language", is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include any or all of the following: government recognition or designation; formal presentation in schooling as the "correct" form of a language; informal monitoring of everyday Usage (language), usage; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a normative spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature (be it prose, poetry, non-ficti ...
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Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language, as well as the distinctions and variations inside each of these. A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups ...
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William Labov
William David Labov ( ; December4, 1927December17, 2024) was an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics, and "one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries". Labov was a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and pursued research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He retired in 2015 but continued to publish research until his death in 2024. Early life and education Labov was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, Rutherford, moving to Fort Lee, New Jersey, Fort Lee at age 12. According to Labov, the physician who delivered him was William Carlos Williams. He attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry. He graduated fr ...
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Harold Orton
Harold Orton (23 October 1898 – 7 March 1975) was a British dialectologist and professor of English language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds. Early life Orton was born in Byers Green, County Durham, on 23 October 1898 and was educated at King James I Grammar School, in Bishop Auckland, and at the University of Durham. He left university in 1917 to enrol in the Durham Light Infantry in which he was commissioned as a lieutenant. He was wounded severely in 1918, never regaining full use of his right arm, and was invalided out of the army in 1919. He insisted to army surgeons that his arm not be amputated. Academic career After leaving the army, in 1918 Orton went to Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld and Joseph Wright, author of the '' English Dialect Dictionary'' (McDavid, 1976). His thesis from Oxford, on the dialect of his native Byers Green, was later published as a book. He then spent several years on the staff ...
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Jules Gilliéron
Jules Gilliéron (21 December 1854 – 26 April 1926) was a Swiss-French linguist and dialectologist Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , '' -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-fiel .... From 1883 until his death, he taught dialectology at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. In 1887, he co-founded the ''Revue des patois gallo-romans'' (''Journal of Gallo-Romance dialects''), which was published until 1893. His most notable work was the monumental '' Atlas Linguistique de la France'' (''Linguistic Atlas of France''), published between 1902 and 1910. Selected works * ''La Faillite de l'étymologie phonétique: résumé de conférences faites à l'École pratique des hautes études'' (1919), Neuveville: Beerstecher. * '' Atlas Linguistique de la France'' (1902–1910) (with Edmond Edmont), Paris: E. Champi ...
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Survey Of English Dialects
The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Orton and Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952. Methodology 313 localities were selected from England, the Isle of Man and some areas of Wales close to the English border. Priority was given to rural areas with a history of a stable population. When selecting speakers, priority was given to men, to the elderly and to those who worked in the main industry of the area, for these were a ...
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Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance languages, Romance, Germanic languages, Germanic and Slavic languages, Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area (Leonard Bloomfield) and L-complex (Charles F. Hockett). Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various poin ...
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Joseph Wright (linguist)
Joseph Wright FBA (31 October 1855 – 27 February 1930) was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Early life Wright was born in Idle, near Bradford in the former West Riding of Yorkshire, the second son of Dufton Wright, a woollen cloth weaver and quarryman, and his wife Sarah Ann (née Atkinson). He started work as a "donkey-boy" in a quarry around 1862, at the age of six, leading a donkey-drawn cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened. The family moved to the Middlesbrough area when Dufton found work there in the ironstone mines at Eston. In the 1861 Census, the family were living at Kirkleatham. Despite having partially grown up in this area, Joseph Wright never wrote a word on the dialect of the Middlesbrough area. On returning to Yorkshire, he later became a bobbin doffer – responsible for removing and replacing full bobbins – in a mill in Sir T ...
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Pluricentric Language
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, Singapore, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process. Examples of varying degrees of pluricentrism Arabic Pre-Islamic Arabic can be considered a polycentric language. In ...
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Social Sciences
Social science (often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of society, societies and the Social relation, relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology, and political science. The majority of Positivism, positivist social scientists use methods resembling those used in the natural sciences as tools for understanding societies, and so define science in its stricter Modern science, modern sense. Speculative social scientists, otherwise known as Antipositivism, interpretivist scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing Em ...
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Linguistic Atlas Of New England
The ''Linguistic Atlas of New England'' (LANE), edited by Hans Kurath in collaboration with Miles L. Hanley, Bernard Bloch, Guy S. Lowman, Marcus L. Hansen and Julia Bloch, is a book of linguistic maps describing the dialects of New England in the 1930s. LANE consists of 734 maps over three volumes, and is the first major study of the dialects in the northeastern United States. The six New England states were studied—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—in addition to some data from Long Island in the state of New York, and the southern edge of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Transcriptions of pronunciations elicited from informants across the region were printed directly onto maps of New England, at the location of each informant's hometown. One map was included for each of the 734 items that were studied. Background LANE was the first component of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States (LAUS). LAUS was first proposed in 1 ...
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Dictionary Of American Regional English
The ''Dictionary of American Regional English'' (''DARE'') is a record of regional variations within American English, published in five volumes from 1985 to 2012 and based on data mostly collected in the 1960s. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not document the standard language used throughout the country. Instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that are learned from family and friends rather than from teachers and books. For ''DARE'', a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most (but not all) of the country. National Endowment for the Humanities#Humanities magazine, ''Humanities'' magazine has described it as "a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary", and William Safire called it "the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century". The ''Dictionary'' is based both on face-to-face interviews ...
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